The Color of the Soul
by chaoticlivi
Summary: Soul Eater Discworld AU. Maka is a young witch in training, and she's not too sure about her mentor. But the Disc has a lot of magic in store, and learning to respect Miss Blair will soon be the least of her concerns. Eventual SoulxMaka.
1. Having an open mind

At the tender young age of 13, Maka Albarn started her apprenticeship with Miss Blair. She knew, right from the start, that Miss Blair was not a normal witch, and that's saying something, because no witch has ever really fit the definition of "normal" to begin with. (To be fair, what most people mean by "normal" is actually "stultifyingly boring.")

It would be many months until she put her finger on exactly what was not normal, however.

In all honesty, Maka thought as she took her intensely detailed notes on the local flora and fauna, she would not have gone to Miss Blair for an apprenticeship at all if she'd had any other options. The woman rarely came into town, but when she did, she had a habit of being flirtatious with Maka's father, Spirit - an oddly ethereal name for a man of such worldly pleasures.

Maka was not entirely sure what her mama was up to at this moment. However, she did know that she had left because of Papa's philandering ways, and while the witch had not done anything with him as far as Maka knew, she had at first felt dirty for even going near her.

And yet before she left, Mama had said: "You have so much potential, sweetheart. I know you don't like the witch that lives nearby, but I want you to learn from her."

And because Mama had asked, Maka swallowed her pride. Early the morning after her mother left, she also left home without telling her father, made the three-mile walk to Miss Blair's little house, and knocked on the door.

While waiting for an answer, she observed the home with some distaste. It was positioned on the edge of a forest and a field of wheat, which was nice, but the house itself, well-

It was a pumpkin.

Not an actual pumpkin. A colossal wooden replica. How could she ever get along with someone this obscenely _gaudy_?

When Miss Blair opened the door, she gasped giddily at seeing Maka.

"Ah, hello! What's happening that brings you to my home?" she asked. Listening to her voice, Maka realized that she didn't know Miss Blair's age at all, and she couldn't tell, either.

"I- I think it's time to start my apprenticeship and I was wondering if you could do it?" Maka squeaked more nervously and with far less confidence than she had originally expected. If her words had been written, there would have been multiple question marks at the end.

"Of course!" the witch exclaimed. It all happened so fast that Maka would one day look back and realize that her request was not a surprise at all. In the moment, however, she was dealing with being swept up in a bear hug by her new mentor, who had always struck Maka as exceedingly catlike but now seemed more like an enthusiastic puppy.

For a week, Maka felt like she was simply tolerating Miss Blair - "No, just call me Blair! Only call me Miss Blair in front of townsfolk."

Miss Blair - er, just-Blair - seemed to be partially a nudist. She would walk around at home unclothed for days at a time, and at first Maka was too afraid to ask why - would it be rude? Would it send Blair into some kind of angry frenzy? She just didn't know - but she finally mustered the question. Blair answered, "It's important to be naked sometimes. You need to be comfortable in your skin, not your clothes." Maka was still not sure how well this justified it, because she had grown up learning that nudity is shameful and only ever leads to Sinful Things We Don't Talk About Around Here, but it did sound like good advice.

Slowly, her judgments of Miss Blair began to unravel.

She was still uneasy with the knowledge that when men were around, her mentor would flirt shamelessly. It was a quirk that Maka would probably always have trouble dealing with. But Blair was also easygoing and at peace with the world in a way that Maka had never seen before.

After watching her deal with some men who were trying to rob an elderly storeowner brandishing some crudely-made weapons, Maka also realized the older woman could actually be quite terrifying (as well as athletic) and merely chose to act sweet, flaky, and friendly most of the time.

Most of the tasks Blair gave Maka, especially at this point, were quite mundane. Being a witch, she said, is not about the stuffy, showy, snobbish magic they teach at Unseen University. Being a witch is about finding the magic in everything, learning how it flows through and around oneself. Good witches do years of hard, hands-on work instead of poring over musty, ancient tomes, so Maka spent a lot of time outside tending animals, building whatever Blair asked her to for whatever miscellaneous whimsical reason, and observing the local flora and fauna.

Blair did consider Maka's interests, though, which just happened to include musty, ancient tomes. Maka learned about the magic of those tomes, such as how to read the minds of the people who wrote them and who and what had possessed them over the years. She learned languages through context alone. She learned about why books do matter to an impoverished, illiterate seven-year-old homeless boy tossing stones into the thick waters of the River Ankh.

It was not until she had been living with Blair for three months that Maka's opinion of her was entirely erased and rewritten.

A severe illness swept through the nearby little town, and Spirit fell victim to it. For the first time since leaving home, Maka felt ashamed to have been so angry at him; once again she found herself sleeping in the bed in the room that he had never changed when she left. Because there were so many sick people, Blair and Maka stayed in town for the week helping to heal the ill. Naturally, part of this included healing her own father.

"But I don't know how to heal sickness," Maka confided. She was sure that she was in far over her head. "I don't even know how to keep myself from getting sick."

"You do know," Blair said, taking her hand and looking into her eyes. "I wouldn't be bringing you here if I thought you couldn't handle it. Remember to be gentle with the magic that runs through you and others. Remember to be patient. Remember all the times we've talked about connections, and how the magic in your blood will do its best when you are putting everything into the littlest tasks for others."

Maka had trouble putting her energy into dealing with too many people. She was too nervous, and she knew she would get sick as well if she tried.

In fact, it was Blair who would leave the house during the day and visit countless other homes. Maka instead stayed with her father and made soup all day.

For the first day, he did not speak when she got home. This worried her, because usually her father was the obnoxious sort who fawned over her every move and he should have acted overjoyed to see her. Instead, he laid on his back with his eyes closed while she kept him company.

Halfway through the next day, he opened his eyes and smiled and she got him to eat soup. His first words were "Nguh - spicy!"

"Miss Blair makes it. Chicken and herbs. It's good for you," Maka said apologetically.

The rest of the week sped by. There were no official words of reconciliation spoken between Maka and her father, but both felt a warmth return to their hearts which had not been there since Mama left. There had been only two deaths in the town, and one had happened before the witches had arrived. Maka actually gave her father a hug, and she and Blair walked home in the evening.

"I never want to see chicken and herb soup again," Maka groaned.

Blair grinned. "May as well get used to it, sweetheart. It works. Also, I wanted to let you know you didn't do too badly for your first time, but you'll need to work on your anxiety and confidence."

Maka only nodded and felt a little embarrassed that she hadn't learned more, learned faster.

Life trundled on, though, and everything - including everyday chores and learning tasks - went back to normal quickly after that. One day, while doing her observations in the forest undergrowth, Maka found an oddly-shaped instrument.

After pulling it out and cleaning the dirt off, she realized it was a scythe.

* * *

**Author's Note:** So there you go. All the chapters will not be this short, but I really wanted to post the beginning. As you can see, I've messed with the Discworld a little bit and the story/style is also not for everyone, but if you have enjoyed it so far I hope you will continue to enjoy it!


	2. Evidence of any thinking

_There was a spark. Maybe not a spark. A tiny sun, perhaps, that touched him somewhere it didn't hurt. He couldn't see it, though. He couldn't open his eyes. Did he have eyes? What are eyes?_

_He was vaguely aware that he existed. It occurred to him that he should maybe be concerned about not knowing more about himself than that, but thinking at all was like swimming through quicksand._

* * *

Over time, as she adjusted to the work and the absurdity inherent in witch-training, Maka returned to a slightly lighter-hearted version of herself. Much of it had to do with finding more respect for her teacher. She felt safer and less alone in Blair's hands than when she had begun, now a full two years ago.

Before going to apprentice with Blair, Maka had friends in her own town and nearby towns. To them, she had seemed to drop off the rim of the Disc, too busy and worried about her own growth to make the walk to town very often. She often wanted time alone to think. When she realized she had not spent more than ten minutes with any of her friends for over a year, though, she decided it would be necessary to finish all her work early and convince Blair to let her go for the night.

She was fifteen years old by now. Blair's philosophy of teaching seemed to be that physical labor, spiritual labor, and the labor of thought were the three keys to becoming a good witch. Maka had a hard time believing, at first, that Blair really cared about intelligence, because Maka had once thought of the older woman as an idiot. But she soon learned that she had been mistaking good cheer and flirtation for stupidity.

Maka's physical labor had been partly in the form of reaping the harvest - one in the spring, one in the autumn - with the scythe she had found.

At other times, Blair asked her to do chores (with and without the scythe) that made no sense to Maka, but she'd long since learned that there was usually no point in asking for the reasoning behind a lesson ahead of time.

She had brought the scythe to her mentor with dirt still clinging to it, and Blair had spent some time examining the blade. The thing was rusted, but there was just a faint trace of an odd pattern on it, as though it had been a ceremonial item of some kind. After spending a full day with it, Blair had handed it back to Maka.

"I want you to clean it and start using it," she had ordered with a smile.

* * *

_The world was black, and then it was ill-defined blobs of light and dark. He was definitely sure he could remember a past. He existed and he was a person with, yes, two parents, a brother, and a piano. They called him Soul._

_The heat of the little sun transformed into other things. It became a voice, images. There were other little suns and multiple voices and images, too, but rarely were any as close as the first one._

* * *

Black Star and Kid would be home for a few days.

"Maka!" Black Star grinned. He slammed a fist enthusiastically against the table. "Long time no see. Don't tell me we've lost you forever."

"Good to see you again," Kid nodded with an air of calm and dignity, a small, mysterious smile playing across his lips.

Kid and Black Star were each unique in ways that people - to put it delicately - had trouble responding to. Black Star had long suffered from a serious inferiority complex, seeking strength and power beyond that of a god. He had formed the most bizarre of friendships with Kid based on an intense kind of competition.

Kid, he reasoned, must be something like a god, based on the fact that he was the son of Death.

Or, more precisely, he claimed to be the son of Death. Nobody around here had ever actually seen Death (except the witches, who were mysterious and tight-lipped about these otherworldly things), and a lot of people were skeptical. They assumed Kid was a wizard-prodigy of some kind, claiming a relation to the Grim Reaper because wizards are an odd group of people who make sketchy claims for their own murky purposes. But Black Star, for reasons unbeknownst even to Maka, fully believed Kid, who had come into their lives three years before Maka left to become a witch. Since then the two boys' lives had become a series of journeys, reunions, competitive clashes, and camaraderie.

She found it kind of cute, really, like a couple of competitive little brothers.

"It's great to see you two," Maka smiled. Being with her old friends always made the weight of life feel a little lighter. There was already a basket of bread on the table, as well as three mugs of a beverage the tavern was unusually well-known for: coffee. Most people come to taverns to get drunk and eat obscene amounts of greasy stuff vaguely in the category of "food," and that was easy enough here, but the owner was obsessed with coffee to an unhealthy degree.

"Big news," Black Star said, interrupting Maka's thoughts. "I'm pretty sure everyone in all of Ankh-Morpork knows my name now! I'm getting famous."

"That's...great?" Maka tried.

"I'm not sure about that," Kid said dryly. "He almost set the Patrician's house on fire."

Maka turned her head and stared disbelievingly at Black Star. "How are you _alive_?"

"He almost wasn't-"

"They just don't appreciate true strength when they see it," Black Star said loftily. "They'll change their minds someday, when they find out I was trying to save their asses. There might have been a little collateral damage but nothing that can't be reversed."

Maka chuckled. "Wow, Black Star. Admitting you did damage? That's a first for you."

"No, it's not," her friend answered earnestly. "I've grown a lot, you know, Maka, since you went to live with Blair."

"I have to say he's right," Kid admitted as he fiddled with the silverware, arranging each place setting - even the unused ones - just so. He sighed and muttered, "Not that he doesn't have a very long way to go."

"What were you doing that almost started a fire?" Maka asked suspiciously. Black Star and Kid gave each other an out-of-place serious look.

"There was...I would like to tell you, but I'm not sure it would be prudent right now," Kid said with a furrowed brow. "You understand. Let's just say we were trying to prevent a disaster and things got out of our control."

Maka ooh'd in fascination, then quickly rearranged her face into her most reproachful pout. "Why can't you tell me?"

Black Star shrugged. "Promise we'll tell you eventually. Just trust us."

"It's not really fair to tell me some huge event happened and leave it at that," Maka said sulkily. At this, Kid raised an eyebrow.

"If we don't tell you a little, we'll never have anything to talk about. Why don't you tell us how things have been going for you, though?"

* * *

They talked long into the night. As Kid and Black Star left the inn, Kid sighed in relief.

"We really shouldn't have brought it up in the first place," he scolded Black Star.

"Tch. Whatever. It's like you said. We wouldn't have anything to talk about otherwise."

"You know as well as I do that if she finds out too much, she'll get involved, and no one wants to see her get hurt."

Black Star grudgingly agreed.

* * *

_He had a body. It was kind of counterintuitive, considering that he was used to having four limbs and human flesh, but it was there, and there were feelings. Bumping, resting, grinding, jabbing, slicing, heating, freezing._

_Comfort and pain._

_He could hear everything now, and see, too. He realized he was a scythe, and that was wheat, and there was a girl who used him._

_There, she would reap grain with him. And lean him against the inside of the shed at night. She studied his blade, obviously looking at something on it - he wished he knew what. There was another woman who called her "Maka." Maka called the other woman "Blair."_

_He was regaining senses. When he could see, hear, and feel everything clearly - ah, and smell, he realized - he also regained the ability to tell time. Days and nights passed more quickly than he might have expected._

_He got to know her, Maka. Blair too. They were witches, and for some reason this worried him at first, but them he realized how much more they knew than him. And he felt respect._

_Now if only he could work out how to talk. Surely it would be possible._

* * *

She let the scythe drag across the ground. It made an obnoxious scraping sound, but she was willing to cope with it if she didn't have to put the energy into lifting it up.

"Do you _mind_?" said a voice. It was a bit faint and far more metallic than any voice should ever be, but she definitely heard it, and Maka stopped in her tracks.

"Show yourself," she demanded immediately, looking around for strange people and strange creatures lurking in the wheat.

"If I had a better way to do that, we wouldn't be having this conversation," the voice answered smartly. "You're holding me. Yes, I'm a talking scythe. Now pick me up so I can stop making that horrible noise."

Maka glanced disbelievingly backward at the blade.

"Also, you're giving me a headache," it added.

"How do I know I can trust you?"

The voice answered, louder this time. "I'm telling you, I'm not asking you for some kind of sacrifice, I just don't want to be dragged. It's not a pleasant experience for me so please just pick me up."

She shrugged. Crazier things had happened and she didn't know what else to do, so she hefted the scythe over her shoulder and kept walking back toward Blair's cabin.

Maka briefly considered the possibility that she was hallucinating, but thanks to an unfortunate misadventure with a mysterious talking frog and some mushrooms, she had experienced hallucinations before. This felt nothing like those. The insight she worked so hard to develop told her this was all really happening.

"Thanks," the scythe said uncertainly.

She looked over her shoulder and saw how vivid the pattern on the blade was. No longer was it faded and dingy-looking; it was of two colors, red and black zigzagged together, and there was apparently an eyeball-like pattern on the shaft where it met the blade.

A million questions swirled in Maka's head. She began gingerly, not wanting to anger the thing, and went with the most polite option even though she would have loved to hurl a flurry of questions.

"Can I ask for your name?" she kept her voice light and pleasant, as if meeting a new person at a fancy party rather than making the acquaintance of farming equipment.

"Soul," it answered.

It? The voice sounded male, so should she call it "he"? She had absolutely no experience with asking for the genders of objects that were meant to be inanimate. It couldn't do any harm to call it "he" in her mind, right? Certainly it would be more respectful than "it." She felt better already.

"I hope you don't mind me asking, but I'm not really used to...this...and I was wondering-"

"Calm down, Maka. You don't have to talk like that. You sound like you're talking to a professor or something."

His voice and words did put her at ease.

Pushing aside for now the question about how a scythe knows what a professor is, Maka asked instead, "Wait. How do you know my name? I never told you."

"I've been around you for a long time," Soul told her.

"You've been stalking me, then?" Maka's eyes widened.

"Not very effectively since, you know, _I can't walk_. You do carry me a lot and talk to people around me, though."

"Well what are you, then?"

"I..." the scythe faltered. "Last time I checked, I was a person. But then I wasn't. I've been waking up for a long time now. It's like waking up from a dream I can't remember. Like before I went to sleep, I was a person, and then I went to sleep and had a dream I can't remember and it took years to wake up and now that I'm finally awake I'm an agricultural tool."

Maka stopped, having reached the edge of the woods, and found a convenient rock to prop the scythe against so she could sit next to it. She studied its eye.

The eye changed from the first wide-open position she had noticed to a confused semi-lidded look, which made her gasp a little in surprise.

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know," she answered honestly. "I really wish I could find out what happened to you."

"So do I," Soul answered. She heard him sigh metallically.

* * *

**Note:** Thanks for your patience. Life is busy. But also thank you for the kind reviews, faves, and follows!


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